IBM Rivals and Clients

Oracle also has been talking about
how they're looking at vertically integrated optimized systems. It sounds like IBM's strategy-they even said they want to be
like IBM of the '60s. How is Oracle's approach
different, or what sets IBM
apart?
They do talk a lot. Just one problem: When Oracle talks about Oracle
software and Sun hardware being "vertically integrated systems," in
reality it's just packaging a bag of parts and putting a label on it.
Workload-optimized systems require years of R&D and close work with
clients. Optimized systems require long-term investments, deep integration,
industry knowledge ... partnerships with clients and business partners. It's a
long list. We've invested billions. We've worked with clients, the world's top
banks for example, for decades on the integrated systems that run today's
global banking transactions. And now we're widening the gap with most
innovative and integrated systems, optimized for the most demanding workloads.
You can't do that with a bag of parts.

What about HP?

Leaders in this market innovate. They attack the real pains their customers
are experiencing. But even today, some in our industry, such as HP, still seem
to believe that information technology has become a commodity. If you really
understand where the technology is going-that it is moving out of the back
office and into the front lines and into the core business of every
organization-you see the idea of "smarter systems" is resonating with
decision makers. These decision makers have real business needs. They want an
infrastructure that is not only as secure as a laptop PC, they need to process
exabytes of data, in real time. They do not want to revert to the inefficient
sprawl of the 1990s. They know what that's like when they pour all their
resources into operating and maintaining the mess.
We are accelerating our market position through continued innovation at
every point across the stack, delivering what I call intelligent performance
versus raw performance. We can definitely scale the technology to get the raw
performance, but given the complexity of today's IT infrastructure
environments, IT managers also need to see improvement and simplification in
how they manage that environment: virtualization, consolidation, systems
management and workload optimization. So that's what we're focused on and,
ultimately, what differentiates IBM from our
competitors.
Can you give me a few examples of IBM clients that are using IBM systems in innovative ways?
Rice University
is collaborating with Texas Medical
Center on a research project to
better understand root causes of cancer and other diseases. Rice told us that
memory was a huge issue for them. Existing systems didn't provide enough memory
for data-intensive work such as genomic sequencing, protein folding, drug
modeling and simulating a multitude of molecular interactions in normal and
unhealthy tissues. IBM responded to this
feedback when we built innovative memory-doubling features into Power7. Rice
also told us that fast parallel processing is very important to its medical
research-that is, being able to process multiple jobs in real time so that
teams of researchers in disparate locations are working off the latest
information. This feedback played a part in IBM
designing Power7 with strong parallel processing capabilities.
Another good example is smart electrical grids. eMeter provides software for
smart electrical grids, and the company is a great example of an ISV
choosing IBM technology for emerging,
data-intensive business models. What does this look like in the real world? One
eMeter client is CenterPoint Energy in Houston, an $8 billion energy wholesaler
with more than 5 million electric and gas customers across six states.
CenterPoint Energy has deployed more than 100,000 smart meters and expects to
install more than 2 million meters by 2014. They're capturing power usage data
from homes and businesses every 15 minutes. In late March, eMeter and IBM
announced a unique bundled software package, available preloaded on Power7,
that helps utilities customers do Smart Grid implementations out of the box.
This integrated bundle can help utilities cut Smart grid implementation and
test time from a year to six months, and drop 60 percent off the implementation
cost.
One more example is Acxiom Corp., a leader in interactive marketing services
and early user of eX5 systems. Acxiom analyzes massive amounts of rapidly
ballooning Web-based consumer data on behalf of its clients-including seven of
the top 10 retail banks and nine of the top 10 auto makers. They've gone from 4
petabytes one year ago to 7 petabytes just six months ago to more than 10
petabytes of data today. Their CIO calls IBM's
new eX5 systems 'game changers' because of their ability to let Acxiom double
their virtualization capacity, dropping software licensing costs.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.